Keep a Light Off For You
by RubyTuesday13
Summary: GarrettxViktoria. ..And how they met. Or, more accurately, failed to do so. It turns out, inexplicable people tend to dislike explaining themselves.
1. Where Sweet is an Acquired Taste

It's melting away, scampering for tight corners and the sturdy weight of heavy stone bridges, panicking, nestling in bits of uneven masonry, scratching its last lines into every door. Everything's a stopgap- the dawn is encroaching at sharp angles and will give less quarter every hour.

The sun's up, again, and Garrett wants to go home.

Someone is watching him.

He is an empty doorway, and someone is watching him.

He is a cramped alley, and someone is watching him.

He is a black crack, and someone is, very persistently, still watching him.

Garrett has noticed, from time to time, that there's a particular bit of his spine that starts to itch at the mere thought of Keepers. It's on fire.

He takes the long way home and gets there twice as fast. Shadows only move this way in the early morning.

When he seeps into the shady side of his street, he finds his lamp lit. His eyes narrow at the lone window, flickering smugly at him.

He hates that lamp, he hates to light it. He doesn't think he's ever replaced the oil.

It is approximately eleven seconds later when he ducks into his tenement through the very same window. Hey, the thing might be a traitor, but he's not picky about loyalties.

He descends the table's top and lone chair in impossibly quiet steps and stares at the still unalerted trespasser for about a minute straight before saying, "If you did enough research to find this place-"

He is almost_ impressed _when her posture holds perfectly firm in her high-backed chair.

.._His_ high-backed chair.

"-you really should've picked up somewhere along the way that I don't even _do_ the kind of thing you're looking for. And even if I did.. there's just something about extramarital crime. Call it old fashioned, but I just hate to come between two people who obviously feel so deeply for each other..." Sarcasm is beneath him, this is something more like satire. He offers, because he is not without sympathy, "If your heart's still absolutely set on it, violent crime hangs out down by the Docks." He waggles a thumb, and almost expects her to wordlessly leave and wander off that a-way.

Or maybe... glide off that a-way. He develops a strange suspicion that she doesn't have legs under there.

She's _very odd_, he realizes suddenly, a minute of observation coming together like an expanding telescope collapsing and leaving him feeling slightly ill from the change of focus. He almost thinks, for a moment, that she _isn't_ here in hopes of getting her husband out of the picture. He considers going right back out the window he came in.

"The pleasure's all mine, Mr. Garrett," she says, surprising him with a voice, like shiftless, viscous honey. She is staring, apparently fascinated, into the eye of a burnt-out flashbomb perched on three of her fingers. Her _five_ fingers. He counts, just to make sure. "You can keep your generous recommendations. I'm not interested in a common thug."

His sword sings softly from its sheath, sliding up and down the note. The flashbomb doesn't even wobble on its tenuous perch.

He purses his lips and hangs the sword up with a finger.

"The closest you could get," Garrett responds half-heartedly, "is humiliating him in front of his peers." He waffles, baiting her, "But, really... once it was an _assignment_, it would take all the fun out of it... How bout you just get out?" There is the smallest bit of threat behind his words, nothing tangible.

She is angling her head into the dark gaze of the riveted metal ball, as though it has suddenly surprised her.

"Garrett?" she turns and waits for his eyes. "May I call you Garrett?"

She gets them, after a long moment. They are narrowed, but he is almost certain she can't see them in the dark. Almost.

Hers are black, or close enough; her brows fine and imperious, one of them arching like she has to hold it down, most of the time. "I'm not interested in a petty thug, either." He takes silent offense for no reason he can name, and forgets all about the door his hand is lightly touching. "What I _am_ interested in are.. oddities. Of all shapes and sizes." There is lamplight on her raised and tilted chin, and the wall. "You happened to be high on my list, so here I am."

His head tilts back on it's hinges, eyes glinting just a little, in the dark space where his face persistently fails to exist, "...Ahh. So, _you're_ the Viktoria I've been hearing so much about." Really it's the opposite, and that worries him. No one seems to have _any _information on her. New money is always a wild card. New money without any apparent source is five, hidden up a convenient sleeve.

Her face doesn't give, perfectly still and serene under the searching flicker.

She is much younger than he would've expected, but seems older. He imagines it's the drab, out-of-date fashions in just-boiled green that drape her in decidedly unappealing ways. Despite this, he catches himself, after a moment, still searching for the points at which the drape ends. He doubles back, decides she is not even particularly pretty, and stops looking at her.

"So.. you've got a.. list of _odd things_. Interesting." He did not say this like it was. "Have you delegated a cozy spot on there for yourself? Because, I have to say, somebody who makes compulsive inventories of all things strange..."

"I'm not on the list," her eyelashes whisper together, as though plotting something. "I'm perfectly explicable."

"Well that's interesting, because I know about a half dozen members of the city's rich and powerful who'd put you right up there."

He passes her chair, without a single note of apprehension --In some ways, her reputation, or lack thereof, is reassuring. Anyone that the wardens, not just on one, but on _all_ sides, are _wary_ of is certainly not ambitious enough to be in it for the politics. He is pretty curious to know, on the other hand, just what she _is_ in it for. A lack of politics always seems to make folks more.. interesting.

"You seem to have a lot of insight into the workings of the polity, for someone so apparently concerned with his status as an independent," she says, amused.

She's done _her_ research, too.

"Sure, as long as it keeps my torso arrow-free.. Though it does depend on how lately I've run the Auldale Gauntlet for the latest stack of death threats, and.. also gossip."

"...You've _named_ it," she observes. "Naming is such an interesting phenomenon, don't you think? To have such familiarity to have to shorten an idea to words... It must.. bore you, robbing the same simpleminded people, over and over, reworking old routes, reselling the same heirlooms..."

He shakes his head, turning away with a sniff, "Well your persistence is of a less violent brand than the rest of your kind, but I can't say I'm any more impressed. Look, lady, I'm pretty sure you already knew my rule, and just came here looking to bend it. I don't work _for_ people, or _with_ people, or even in the same _general area _as people, where situation allows..."

"Viktoria," she corrects him, and points out politely, "We've met formally now."

He doesn't like the tone, like she's threatening having seen him before.

"I don't rob greenhouses." He reads his mail, and the words barely slip under his eyes.

Her lips climb half of her face. She is pure curiousity, "And why is that?"

He looks away from his mail to an empty spot on his wall, and says, with surprising honesty, "Plants bother me."

She laughs aloud, setting a hand to her chin. Her laugh sounds even more like honey. That is to say, sticky; it stretches too long in places, and leaves an unpleasant residue in others.

Garrett doesn't bristle, as a rule. "They _don't_ bother you? I take it you're not from around here.."

Information _is_ still king in this business.

"No," she replies lightly, "But I vacation as often as possible. You can't even see the stars anymore inside the city limits."

"Never liked them anyway," he dismisses. "Always winking, like they know something."

She looks at him now; shrewdly, he might even call it, were he capable of feeling generous.

"Mm. You're a creature of dark.." She seems to arrive at this conclusion by staring into his soul, or something similarly metaphysical.

He stops sifting and glances up. "Has anyone ever told you that you sound like a bad theater production when you talk?"

Her lip curls further, "You'd like to blow out this lamp very much right now, wouldn't you?" she nods to it, surreptitiously, as though she and the lamp are in league. "I can tell. You keep giving it _suspicious looks_."

Garrett's not quite sure what do to with this, because it is entirely accurate. He states, didactically, "..Lamp oil is expensive."

"_And_ a creature of thrift. How _do_ you keep the ladies away?"

"Well, I'm _very _sneaky."

"Yes. I've heard. I believe my favorite version of the local folk tale about you involved snatching the purse off an unsuspecting shadow."

Garrett is flattered, in spite of himself, scratching his chin at the ceiling, "Doesn't sound familiar. Was the shadow drunk? That would explain a lot. Someone must've been drunk, in that scenario, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't me."

"Real stealth is a shockingly rare skill in your field. A very interesting one, even a valuable one, to some people."

He gives a slight snort, "...Are you still _here?_" he tosses the mail down on the table and looks her right in the eye for probably the first time. "Because you seem like a woman on the go. Half this city is populated by criminals, I'm sure you can find one that isn't immune to your impossibly subtle plying.."

She scans his face briefly, meeting him blink for blink, aloof to the point of a strange deadness somewhere inside her pupils. She is still playing with her pet flashbomb, now settled between two horizontal splayed fingers, "You'd do an _interesting_ job with or without my request. And if you'd heard anything about the manor in question or its owner you would've been on it faster than starved locusts in July." She waxed poetic. "So... are you really going to let the mere act of my suggesting it to you --and, of course, offering you a significantly larger return on the delivery of a _single item_-- deny you the right of that choice? If you're really so practical as you profess to be, you shouldn't have any problems with it."

He holds the dead look in her eyes for a long moment, as if waiting for it to crack and reveal... something he's pretty sure is in there somewhere.

"..Apparently you _can_ catch more flies with honey," he is surprised, and plunks into a chair, throwing his feet up on the table. "Alright, give me details. Then I'll decide."

Her back straightens further than is humanly possible, and does not even crackle.

"They say the most intelligent creatures are those capable of easily adapting to new surroundings," she comments, airily, stretching, then lays out a map for him on the table. Its edges are green and it has close to nothing on it. "Lord Constantine just finished building his dream house."


	2. And Eyes in Every Hollow

_(A/N) It's such a dead fandom, but these two won't fall out of my head, yet. Plus, where else can you write like this? I just __**need**__ the vagary of it. Disclaimer: I do not own the only videogame I played as a youth that I would still consider __**art**__. Yeah, you heard me, Ebert. (A/N) edit. Some new bits, tonal changes, and I'm suddenly much happier with it-- please more concrit if you have time, it gives me some much needed perspective and makes me feel like I'm not just out here writing crazy poetical shit at nobody._

Viktoria is surprised that the perfect litany impresses her employer-- Garrett takes everything that is not nailed down, with a kind of compulsion that would kill any lesser thief. And Constantine can only sing praise, as his house is picked clean. Constantine, she has found, is oddly more generous than the Trickster of legend.

Her hair writhes down her shoulder, restless. "Mmnh," she is noncommital. "It's a shame we only need him to acquire _one_ item of value. And we'd be lucky if it were only.. nailed down."

Garrett, meanwhile, leaks murkily down their dripping walls. They observe him: a child behind a candy counter, tapping a leatherwound finger at his blackjack, in an odd syncopated rhythm. He listens, patiently, in a dark cleft of trunk for the sound of idleness.

The Lord wanes a moment, to a rasp of ancient lore and a wispy smile, "All the Hammers ever had was nails and boards, nails and boards.."

"Bricks and mortar. Rivets and iron.."

It is a rhyme, but a fresh twist in her dark lips.

"Hmph. Little good it'll do them. This one could picklock his way into a mountain."

"I think you may be getting too attached," she sings-- a song of delight, for Garrett is coming up on the piece d'resistance.

Garrett wrings out his cloak, at the end of his journey up the drainpipe. He takes a moment, scanning the width of the rim and then the vista beyond. The couch sits, heavily, and the fire crackles. _Loudly_. The thief briefly attempts to explain it all away as a trick of perspective, but gives up quickly, turning back and tilting his head at the _faucet_. "For the man who has everything," he observes, "Why not a really big kitchen sink?"

What a jaded creature. They will have to kill this, dead.

That particular grotto took gelt, believe it well. The workers may have thought the Lord a madman, with his impossibly detailed, preposterous charcoal etchings, his quibbles about "sensory gestalt". In the end, though, all it took was a pair of purse strings: tugged periodically. They got on with it, no questions asked.

In fairness, even Viktoria once questioned if the sheer scale was necessary. Once. In private. But she agrees now, it is more than worth it to watch the guards pace boredly beneath the endless length of coffee table. Like housecats, waiting for a meal of scraps.

Their amusement builds, when Garrett doesn't quite know how to approach his target from such a distance. It is clear he despises open spaces. In this, he is not like them. Not at all.

The roar of the bonfire muffles the low groan of lights blinking out.

"Seventeen.."

"Eighteen, seventeen was the doughty mayor of the little village."

"With greatest respect: your memory is _going_, he was sixteen."

The Trickster simpers. "The memory of a god, like all his other attributes, never fails, my dear. I can still remember _your_ long-passed first bloom with crystalled clarity," he taps her pointed chin.

"Oh yes?" she perches on an unconvinced laugh, "Let us test this crystal ball, then, shall we? ...What was it that I said to you when you first revealed to me your true identity as a dark and vengeful god? Instead of just an eccentric old man with a taste for archaic literatures and an obsessively extensive garden to be tended?"

"Mmhum, back when you were just a slip of a good Pagan girl. A woefully metropolitanized one, but still a good one, however you might have talked.. But then, of course, all of you were, back then, every.. one..." She gives him the look one gives a hare who has strayed. "No," Constantine shakes his creaking wooden neck, "no, no, I remember it well. You took a hard line, and you said..." his brow furrowed, wrinkles grasping at memories, "..ah-ha, you said: Where then, good sir, are your_ horns_?" his teeth spread, like playing cards.

She sniffs, "The horns were what gave you away in the first place..."

"Ah..." he deflates, giving a gesture of recognition, "yes, I.. kept forgetting they were there, during my first days in the city..."

She smiles, a fondness drifting in that nothing but feline eyes and the dark ever saw much of, "What I asked --in my young, _delicate_ way-- after being the very first to bear witness to your long fabled return, was.. whether it begged any sort of monetary _re_ward."

He chortles, then hacks; the finger he points at her is shaking, "Now that does sound familiar.. I suppose I can't blame you. You were skins and bones. Such was my little Viktoria, shorn at her start, a blind, heartless alleycat without master or shame."

The muscles in her face fall slack, "Every one of us knew both quite well, under the Hammer thumb. Some of us just learned to despise them a bit more." She wonders, for a moment, if her blinding, merciless god really _can_ understand the kind of hate his children harbor. Having no mystical dell of their own to retreat to when mallus and tongs are burning into their doors.

"Well, don't fret. Fruition, dear, carnivorous fruition is just around the corner."

But the thought was dismissed from her head, before his reply even registered, already overrun by the tenfold of trampled manflesh, hooves, and claws, and teeth with screams down their roots, endless tailfeathers dragging a vale, a moonlit green mantle on their heels, cracking and tearing its way into place, waterfalls bursting from towering tenements, forests crumbling cobblestones between their earnest surging fingers...

Yes, the low ebb is only ever there to stoke the yearning for high tide, she knows, she trusts. She always has, from the moment that strange mold-smelling man, the one her mother had always insisted was right on his way to gobble them hammerfools up, opened his perennial, arthritic digits and shown her truth in a gently budding chrysalis.

The truth is, Viktoria doesn't need faith, when something is right in front of her face.

Garrett leans, finding a spider the length and breadth of his foot, at his foot. He hisses wordless curses, jabbing at it with his sword.

She hides her smile behind a thoughtful hand, "He might not manage the last floors, you know. He'll be dead, and we'll have lost our most promising candidate."

"You sound almost hopeful," Constantine is appalled at her lack of affection for her own discovery.

Who, meanwhile, thoughtfully erects a network of arrows and ropes, learning from his bested opponents.

"He's.. intelligent," she observes out of thin eyes, thick arachnid-lashes. "Not just skilled. It's not what we want."

"And what convolution of logic has brought that thought to bear?"

"The more intelligent, the harder a person is to control. Intellect must be _convinced _of its tasks, rather than just instructed. I'm sorry to say, my Lord, but you got very lucky with me. I despised the Order enough to share all your longterm goals," she barely betrays a note of smugness.

"Hmph," the chuckle is deep, somewhere in his cavernous belly, "you underrate yourself, you wanted to upset _any_ order you could find.. and, therefore: share all my longterm goals."

"I almost suspect our Garrett might share the sentiment," she tilts. "But he is... slower. More pragmatic. He doesn't accept ideas quickly, not even good ones. And the confidence covers far more paranoia than you might guess."

"Well, that's all fine... does he enjoy empty, meaningless wealth, by any chance?"

Viktoria's brow twists, and she watches Garrett for a moment, a grin climbing one side of his face as he arches out over nothing to grasp the hilt of his floating prize. It mutedly reflects the halo of otherworldly light in his suddenly bared eyes. She knows now, why he hides them-- left unguarded, they are _curious_.

He would never live it down.

"..it'll give him a good enough excuse."


End file.
